MARINETTE HAD NOT YET DECIDED if she even wanted to return to school, and her indecision lasted right up until the moment that she rounded the street corner and laid eyes on Francois Dupont High School.

Then it was startling clear, of course, hitting her like an ice cold droplet of fear trickling down her spine. She did not want to be here. She wanted to walk straight on by, adjusting her purse and pretending like she was an average Parisian fashionista on her way to do fashionista things.

Alas, she was still seventeen, and there were annoyingly many months left in her senior year, and she was the president of the Francois Dupont student body.

Next to her was Alya, and next to Alya—laying a casual, protective arm around her shoulders—was Nino. They had agreed to meet at the Cesairés' apartment and face the day together, united. So Marinette had taken the long way to school this morning, letting the bright but cold sunlight and the walk from the bakery thaw her exhaustion. She was running on, like, two hours of sleep.

There were four vans parked along the kerb opposite to the school. Two white, two black. About sixty adults crowded onto the left and right sides of the entrance stairs, some hefting cameras on their shoulders, some holding microphones with a square mount announcing the platforms they represented. Others seemed less official but still equally hungry for interviews, armed with cell phones that they tipped towards their mouth, rapid muttering words that were drowned in the overall roar of the crowd of the media.

None of them had sighted the trio. Yet.

I do not want to be here.

As soon as Marinette, Alya and Nino approached the stairs, the crowd descended on them.

"Monsieur Lahiffe!" a young woman with leopard print glasses called. "Monsieur Lahiffe! As Adrien's best friend, do you think Adrien knew about his father's secret identity?"

Another reporter targeted Marinette, stepping into her path as she battled her way up the stairs. The balding man shoved a microphone in her face and walked backwards, tracking her every step. "Miss Dupain-Cheng. You're Adrien's classmate. How do you feel about his disappearance last night?"

"Is destruction of property uncharacteristic of Adrien?" someone asked Alya. She shouldered past with fierce determination, then ran into yet another tabloid reporter.

"Does he have a dark side the public doesn't know about?"

God.

Enough was enough.

Marinette glared at the man in front of her. She turned around and exclaimed, to no-one in particular, "Adrien's the best person I've ever known, and that's all I have for the record."

In the temporary silence that followed, those insatiable scavengers falling quiet so as not to miss anything further Marinette might say, she grabbed Alya's arm and Nino's t-shirt. "Come on. Let's get inside."

Tugging her friends with her, Marinette charged through the swarm of bodies. As soon as they were past the threshold—safety provided by the fear of trespassing charges—Nino heaved a long-suffering sigh.

"I miss Adrien."

"Don't we all," Marinette answered.

He still hadn't replied to her texts. Nor Nino's, nor anyone's. It would have driven her crazy with worry—was he alright, was he safe?—if he hadn't been taken into police custody in the early hours of the morning. The breakfast news was flooded with updates on the Agreste scandal and nothing but. Nadja Chamack had presented, which must have been a lucky break for the aspiring correspondent. The biggest story to sweep Paris since ever.

Marinette had tried to absorb every bit of information about Adrien. Admittedly, that meant absorbing the other details, too, and now they overpowered anything positive that she might have gleaned. Like how a formal criminal investigation would be opened into Gabriel Agreste and his activities in several continents over the last eighteen years.

America, Asia, Europe, all terrorised at some point by Hawk Moth. Over her cereal, Marinette had recounted her trip to Shanghai and to New York. Hawk Moth had shown up in both locations, and so had Adrien. At the time, she considered it a wry twist of fate. Now, the revulsion settled over her shoulders like an iron chain, cold, damp, dragging.

This was the man responsible for Adrien's safety. He could have hurt him, so easily.

Maybe Gabriel already had, in a way that didn't leave visible scars.

The few bites of bran flakes Marinette had managed to swallow tossed uneasily in her stomach, buoyed on waves of manic overthinking. When they walked into homeroom class and saw Principal Damocles standing beside Miss Bustier, the sensation only got worse.

God, Marinette really hoped she wouldn't throw up.

"I'm sure we've all seen the news by now," Miss Bustier said, smiling sadly around the class.

Marinette took a mental attendance of her classmates as she sat down in her usual seat. About a third of the students were missing: Chloé Bourgeois, and therefore Sabrina Raincomprix, Alix Kubel, Nathaniel Kurtzberg, Lila Rossi. And. . . well.

It was impossible to not notice the empty spot next to Nino. How could a void take up so much space?

"I won't lie to you, this is a huge shock," Miss Bustier continued. Her eyes—always so warm and loving—were pinched with emotion. "We're all about one degree separated from one of the world's worst supervillains. You're probably questioning a lot of your memories, experiences, what you thought you knew. I know I am."

A shiver went down Marinette's back. She glanced at Alya to find the same uncertainty reflected back at herself.

"But Adrien is still my student. He's still your classmate and friend. We know who he really is and all the things he's done for us," their teacher said, hands spread wide in a gesture of unity.

Principal Damocles nodded. "The news coverage and paparazzi situation is not going to get easier from here, it's only going to get harder. We've arranged with the police for security reinforcements around the school, but there's nothing to stop them from talking to you.

"That's right. Please do not feel pressured to give them any information. You are here to learn, not to be questioned," she said firmly. "Try to ignore them as you're arriving."

The next five minutes were filled with updates on Francois Dupont's response to the Agreste scandal—how they would protect their students, and in turn what they expected from students who represented the school.

Miss Bustier ended with, "The staff all want to be here for you. Reach out if you need help, and as always, please look out for each other."

Marinette glanced around at her classmates and met more than one searching eye. They saw her and softened in sympathy or intrigue or just plain sadness. Yeah, she thought, me, too.

She really had her work cut out for her this year.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

It was not a productive week for Nino.

He was generally not productive at school anyway, but before this international clusterfuck, at least he was making beats, working on the school radio channel, and researching potential university majors. (He was currently thinking about doing both Business Management and Music Production, in case his childhood dream of being a producer didn't pan out.)

Now, he went to school and just watched people. Generally, he watched Alya and Marinette fight and-or set straight and-or comfort the people who approached them about Adrien.

The fighting happened when some irrelevant schoolmates who didn't even know Adrien were being assholes and trying to paint him as a bad guy, instead of a kid who couldn't choose his parents.

The second case happened when students had read too much of the tabloid websites—as full of misinformation as the ocean was of water—and tripped themselves into believing Adrien was dead or something.

The comforting happened the most often. Because most often, everyone knew what an upstanding person Adrien was. Therefore, everyone was big sad about his father being Hawk Moth. Nino included.

He slumped forward on his Algebra textbook, watching but not listening to Ms. Mendeleiev's lesson on vector subspaces.

It was Wednesday now, and Adrien was not back at school and he was not picking up his calls and what the fuck? Was there a chasm between them now? He really shouldn't have told Adrien that he was Carapace. He'd cemented himself as an Enemy of Gabriel, and now maybe Adrien felt like he couldn't reach out to him.

And in that case, who else did he have? He was a private guy in all senses of the word; with his availability, yes, but also with his emotions. He must be having such a rough time, and Nino just wanted to be there for Adrien—

Ms. Mendeleiev abruptly stopped mid-sentence, casting a glare in Nino's direction.

He jolted upright immediately, preparing himself for a question to which he would absolutely not know the answer, but would attempt anyway. But his teacher's thin lips tugged downwards in a frown and then parted around another name: "Alya."

Nino glanced at his girlfriend beside him.

Alya was truly his saving grace. Marinette—blazing her way to design school—had not taken the Economics pathway. She was in the Literature stream, filling her head with boring things that dead people once said, while Nino was here, letting his amazing, multi-talented girlfriend haul his ass over the passing line of anything math-related.

Except. . . Alya had also not had a productive week.

Nino peered lower, discovering that Alya had nestled her smartphone into her lap. She had been discovered staring at it, and everyone knew Ms. Mendeleiev was a hardass about any technology in her classroom that was not for experimental purposes.

"Phones away. You know that," Ms. Mendeleiev snapped.

She dipped her head and apologised sincerely, "Sorry, Ms. Mendeleiev."

Their teacher nodded, sniffing with indignation, and returned to the smartboard.

Alya propped her textbook up, hid her phone behind its pages, and went right back to trawling the news updates on Gabriel Agreste. Nino debated stopping her, but in the end said nothing. It wasn't like he was the paragon of healthy coping habits at present—Alya's Super Penguino plushie was now on loan in his bedroom, one of the only things that could help him sleep easy.

The only thing that put a spark in Alya's eyes these days was the news. He could see it—the glistening feeling of agency, of control—reflecting in her glasses as she read her 'textbook'.

Before Alya had obscured her phone, Nino had caught a glimpse of a chart of some type, with Gabriel's face in the right-hand corner of the screen. A fluctuating red line high on the Y-axis, and then the line absolutely tanking itself at the very end.

In their calls, Alya gushed about each development in the Agreste scandal and hypothesised about its impact on Adrien and made various explanations for why he wasn't allowed to contact them. She never seemed to arrive at the possibility, as Nino anxiously had, that maybe Adrien simply didn't want to.

Because of Alya and only Alya, Nino now knew a great deal about the economic, political and social fallout of Hawk Moth's unmasking; Adrien's inheritance from his mother's side of the family and his modelling earnings were protected in a separate fund. The rest of the Agrestes' assets were seized for evidence, investigation, or reparation.

Gabriel, the brand, was crumbling like a sandcastle underneath a toddler's trampling feet. All stakeholders were jumping ship in an attempt to distance themselves from, in Nino's perspective, the very manifestation of capitalist evil. That chart on Alya's phone was probably stock market value against time or something similar.

Yesterday, the Graham de Vanily's had publicly renounced any type of familial or professional connection to the Agrestes. They claimed Emilie had never and would never be complicit in anything like Gabriel's crimes, and that they did not consider Adrien their legal or personal responsibility. Amelie's statement had been poised and elegant and downright cold.

Nino couldn't imagine his aunt being like that.

On Thursday morning, Nino, Alya and Marinette braced for the fourth morning of confronting the media.

Though the police were onsite, the paparazzi still leaned over the barricades, still yelled their questions at passing students, still aimed their cameras at them. Nino prepared to shield Alya from their unforgiving lenses and deflect their invasive questions about Adrien's personal life.

He didn't have to.

Halfway up the stairs, positioned for maximum publicity, a young woman with a yellow jacket was screeching at the ballsy reporter that dared meet her gaze of stone. "—and no amount of shitty tabloid work is going to save your dying reporting career."

Chloé strutted closer to the woman from Channel One, stabbing a perfectly manicured fingertip. "All of you are washed up vultures preying on the lives of minors—minors, you assholes—could you get any more pathetic?"

Marinette started up the stairs, Alya followed, and Nino stumbled in bewilderment after his girlfriend.

"What are you gawking at, Dupain-Cheng?" Chloé tossed her ponytail and located another lens shoved into her face, speaking with perfect diction and unmistakable venom. "If I see any of you around this school with your cameras out ever again, I'll get my daddy to charge you all with stalking offences! Your careers will be deader than this lady's split ends!"

Chloé pointed at Clara Contard, and Nino—holding Alya against his side—felt more than heard his girlfriend's scandalised, amused bark of laughter.

"She did not," Alya whispered. Oh, but she did.

"Do you hear me?!"

Every microphone and camera lowered. Chloé didn't wait and watch the crowd of reporters and paparazzi file into their vehicles and leave the premises—she simply joined Sabrina at the top of the stairs, who promptly latched onto her arm and heaped verbal praise at her feet, and disappeared past the grand wooden doors—but Nino did. In fact, he relished the sight of the empty streets and bare pavement.

"Chloé's back." Marinette sighed, an almost fond half-smile tugging at her lip. "Yay?"

"Yay," Alya chuckled, squeezing Nino where her arm curled around his waist. "I never thought I'd be grateful for the day."

He squeezed Alya back, already piecing together the story he'd tell Adrien. You won't believe the telling off Chloé gave to a crowd of fully-grown professionals. Nino would tell Adrien. He'd tell him this story, and how sorry he was, and that he would be there for Adrien without conditions or judgement even if he and his father were diametrically opposed entities.

He'd tell Adrien.

Whenever his best friend reached out to him again.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

A / N :

A day late, but here it is! What did you think?

I am a fan of Good!Chloe, or at least a Chloe who can use her powers of venom for good. I have a soft spot for very mean women who punch up instead of down, so maybe I'll give our darling Bourgeois some of those traits. But maybe not.

Aimee <3